Museum regards the mountaintop, overlooks the climb. A Contrary review by Laura M. Browning  Name a woman artist, the author challenges us: you might recall Georgia O’Keeffe, maybe Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot, but most of us can’t play this game for very long. Wilhelmina “Billie” Cole Holladay founded the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1987 to fill the hole left in the male-centric world of art history and museums. How male-centric? Even Janson’s History of Art, a tome you probably lugged around if you took an art history course in college, didn’t include women until 1986. Holladay created NMWA from her personal art collection and the idea, still radical in the 1980s, that women deserved representation in museums. And so A Museum of Their Own should have been an interesting book. But Holladay, while clearly a formidable and savvy art collector and businesswoman, does not fashion the rich narrative her museum deserves. She glosses over tension and conflict—something that might please high-society donors but doesn’t make for a very compelling story. Holladay's museum opened only one year after Janson welcomed a scant nineteen women into his 17,000-year history. If Holladay has avoided discussing challenges to the founding of her museum, she may be burying a story that is not only compelling, but important. The museum’s founding is so filled with luck and opportunity that the journey to museumhood seems nearly effortless. Of a fortuitous newcomer to her Georgetown neighborhood, Claire, Holladay writes: “She said, ‘I want to help, I really want to help,’ and so I invited her to be on the committee. When I rejoined the group one of the members said, ‘Is that Claire Getty? As in J. Paul?’ It had never occurred to me. I realized then that my new neighbor had a more serious interest in art and more substantial resources than most young students in Georgetown. Her grandfather, J. Paul Getty, had given a fortune to establish a great museum in Los Angeles. After a talk with her financial adviser she pledged one million dollars to start our building fund, and she persuaded her sister, Caroline, to pledge another million.” Museum comes packaged ready for coffee tables, and one wonders if it was really intended for serious reading. Given the number of baroque anecdotes about the museum’s early supporters, it was perhaps meant as a thank you gift rather than a book for museum lovers. Occasionally, Holladay overcomes the bland prose to capture a charming anecdote—like agreeing to barter a pickup truck in exchange for an exquisite piece of pottery. Holladay’s greatest success within these pages is what she doesn’t say. The audience for donor anecdotes won’t extend far beyond those intimately connected to NMWA, but the appetite for women’s art is great, and we are given barely a nibble. The collection includes women artists of the Renaissance, the great matriarchs of Pueblo pottery, Lee Krasner’s moody abstractions—pieces any general art museum or collector would be proud to own. Holladay isn’t pandering to sub-par artists just because of their gender. Her dedication and passion for women artists is genuine and fueled by a well-developed eye, and the hints we are given of the treasures in NMWA’s collection—hints given mostly through the gorgeous full-color photographs rather than Holladay’s text—are impressive. Skip the book. But go to the museum. Laura M. Browning is a former exhibit developer, educator, and assistant curator who writes on art museums and the environment. She lives in Chicago and writes for The Nature Conservancy. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
 

A Museum of Their Own

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay

2008, Abbeville Press

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